Thursday, May 28, 1998 Published at 15:05 GMT 16:05 UKHealth: Latest News'Open-minded' healthcare"It is about reaching across the disciplines."The Prince of Wales has urged mainstream medicine to forge a closer relationship with complementary therapies. Prince Charles made his call in a speech to the Integrated Healthcare Conference in London on Thursday. The conference is looking at how the standing of complementary medicines - such as acupuncture, osteopathy and homoeopathy - can be improved. This is the full text of his speech:

The Discussion Document that provides the agenda for our conference today
was launched last October at the inauguration of a series of annual
President's Lectures sponsored by the King's Fund, of which Dr Robert
Maxwell was then Chief Executive. So I am particularly glad to see him
here today, chairing our proceedings. May I also welcome all of you?
Thank you for coming. I understand that even more people would have liked
to come but there is a strict limit to the numbers we could accommodate in
this afternoon's discussion groups.

Can I also thank the Maurice Laing Foundation, whose financial support has helped to make it all possible. When I cast my mind back 14 years to the reaction that greeted my speech on
the occasion of the BMA's 150th anniversary, it is encouraging that things have moved along the road enough to allow a conference like this to take place at all.

Quality of healthcare

One of the most important reasons for this initiative is to make the
quality of healthcare for everyone in this country even better by
harnessing all the medical knowledge and skills available to us - not only
from orthodox western medicine, which has achieved wonders in the last 100
years - but also from other traditions.

This is not a wholly revolutionary proposal. Some branches of orthodox medicine were themselves once novel and outside the medical establishment. Even surgeons, now members of a number of prestigious Royal Colleges, began as mere barbers.

So a central theme of the initiative is to encourage a dialogue among the
different branches and traditions of healthcare and to develop a closer,
more effective relationship. This isn't a question of orthodox medicine
taking over, or of complementary and alternative medicine diluting the
intellectual rigour of orthodoxy.

It is about reaching across the disciplines to help and to learn from one another for the ultimate benefit of the patients you all serve. As the discussion document puts it at the
end of the Introduction, "CAM practitioners, teachers and researchers need to understand the
advantages of more systematic audit and rigorous research; while orthodox practitioners and researchers need to understand the benefits of an approach that places more emphasis on the personal contribution individuals can make to their own well-being, rather than reliance on surgery or drugs."

Continued dialogue

This Conference is a part of that dialogue. This morning we shall hear
from a number of speakers with different medical and healthcare
backgrounds. This afternoon you will have the opportunity to join in the
debate in the discussion groups. I shall much look forward to hearing your
conclusions.

But the Conference is not the end of the process. We need to continue the
dialogue over the next months and years. We need to commit ourselves to a
rigorous, but open-minded evaluation of practice in all aspects of
healthcare: and to find ways of translating ideas into action in the most
effective manner.

I hope that we shall see an increase in research, not
only into the effectiveness and safety of complementary and alternative
therapies and how to improve their effectiveness, but also into what people
want from their healthcare and why they turn in particular to less
conventional care. Discussions on how to carry out and fund such research
are already well advanced.

Professional education

Earlier this year, as part of the initiative, there was a seminar of
leading people involved in the education of doctors, nurses and other
mainstream healthcare professionals to discuss the place of complementary
medicine in their courses.

I am told that there was a very helpful and
positive discussion. More and more medical schools and universities are
providing some familiarisation in complementary medicine, so I am confident
that we shall see a continuation of this trend and the development of
multi-disciplinary courses.

Another seminar, organised in collaboration with the NHS Confederation,
looked at different models of delivering integrated care, their
effectiveness in improving clinical outcomes and the need for further
research and audit. I understand that there are proposals for further
research on the best way of delivering integrated care which may help to
influence the place of complementary and alternative therapies within the
re-organised NHS.

Self-regulation

I hope, too, that the various bodies representing the complementary and
alternative therapies and professions will continue the moves towards
self-regulation on which they have embarked, and that help can be provided
to support them in this effort. The osteopaths and chiropractors have now
achieved statutory regulation and good progress in voluntary
self-regulation is being made by the acupuncture and homeopathy professions
and others.

Action on all these matters is not mainly for me or for the members of the
Steering Committee and Working Groups whose efforts and devotion produced
the Discussion Document. They will continue to be involved and I should
like, again, to express my thanks both to them and to The Foundation for
Integrated Medicine which has supported and organised the initiative
throughout.

The Foundation will continue to perform this role; to
encourage the dialogue; to facilitate new developments; and in some cases
to give practical and financial help. As President of the Foundation, I
shall certainly continue to give my support and encouragement.

But the way ahead is mainly in the hands of the professions themselves,
both orthodox and complementary; the bodies who carry out and fund
research; who educate and train practitioners; and for all those providing
healthcare both within and outside the NHS. I hope therefore that all of
you here today will consider what contribution you and your organisation
can make.

Encouraging responses

Earlier this year I wrote to several of the organisations represented here
today, putting that very question. Already there have been a large number
of responses - most of them very encouraging - some of them perhaps
surprisingly so. I would like to thank all of you for the considerable
thought that has clearly gone into the replies.

Some of you, I know, are
still considering what view you should take and I look forward to hearing
your response in due course. Can I perhaps say that I do not expect you
all to have cut and dried answers. Many of you may need more time to think
about it. You may - as for example the Royal College of Physicians has
done - want to appoint a group within your organisation to look thoroughly
into the implications.

Some of you may have reservations about some of the
proposals - or even misgivings. I hope that you will not feel inhibited in
any way from voicing them or of sending interim replies to the Foundation
for Integrated Medicine. Later this year, there will be a further
gathering specifically for complementary and alternative practitioners, at
which I hope it will be possible for even more of you to be represented.

Think the unthinkable'

I am enormously encouraged by the progress so far. When we embarked on
this voyage, I did not expect to find so great a measure of support for the
objectives, or so great a willingness on the part of both orthodox and
complementary organisations and individuals to talk openly to one another
and to think the unthinkable.

I encourage you to continue that process in
your deliberations this afternoon. And I warn you that I shall be back at
4 o'clock to hear how you have got on!

I would like to leave you for now with what I think is
a rather appropriate Medical Litany composed by Sir Robert Hutchinson
earlier this century:

"From inability to leave well alone;
From too much zeal for what is new and contempt for what is old;
From putting knowledge before wisdom,
science before art, cleverness before common sense;
From treating patients as cases;
From making the cure of a disease more grievous than its endurance;
Good Lord, deliver us."